The tireless Claude Chabrol returns with this sly melodrama, transposing a real-life crime of passion from early 20th Century America to modern France.
Ludivine Sagnier is a local-TV weathergirl courted by two contrasting men: novelist Charles (François Berléand), a suave libertine several decades her senior; and volatile playboy Paul (Benoît Magimel), the posh heir to a pharmaceutical fortune.
If not a radical departure for Chabrol, this is still an elegant, darkly amusing effort that relishes taking digs at the middle-classes while leaving its characters’ supposedly perverse acts firmly to our imaginations.
Tom Dawson
